Are you fascinating beyond compare? Do you own a monkey? Do you put pants on your parakeet? Do you amaze yourself with your own charm, acumen, or shoe collection? Or are you dull as a kitchen knife? Are you unable to find any adjectives to describe yourself in any way? Is “nice” too strong a word to describe you?

Snazzy or nearly invisible, anyone can get themselves written into a novel. Everyone can be a character, whether you are fantastically fantastic or earth-shatteringly boring or somewhere in between. You can even be considered once you are dead. Don’t let a missing pulse keep you from trying.

Here is your guide to getting you – wonderful or zzzzzz’y you – into the closest novel.

1. Know an author (or be one).
2. Think about yourself. Think some more. Write a list of descriptors about yourself (if you are reaching for words and coming up with a blank, please note that words such as “the” do not count as descriptive). Tell yourself all about yourself.
3. Embellish. Whichever direction you lean, make yourself more – much, much more – than you already are. If you are chubby, give yourself about 105 extra pounds. If you are selfish, tell the story of your most self-indulgent moment and make it worse than ever. If you are simply fabulous, just because, then crank up the fabulous. Flat and nearly invisible? Dull it up!
4. Ask your friends or monkey what qualities about you they adore, or abhor, or wish you had, or can’t even come up with. Memorize these desperately or dispense with them entirely depending on whether they please you (unless you are incapable of pleasure, in which case, hang on to them until step 8).
5. Record a few of the things you love/hate/tolerate doing. Perhaps you are a shockingly old champion ice skater, having won every gold medal since the Olympics began. Or maybe you are an excellent cannibal, with the additional skill of eluding police at every turn. Or perhaps you can carve fruit into tiny animals, or bowl badly. Or you may be one of only 10 human beings alive who neither understand, create, nor generate humor, like that guy Michael I dated (briefly).
6. Whatever it is, record, record, RECORD. Write each element on a sticky note or expensive Japanese handmade paper, depending on your character. Finally, once completed, write the manner in which you fascinatingly/weirdly/mind-numbingly dully accomplished this.
7. Compile the list into one paragraph on another sticky/Japanese piece of paper. Put the words together into one run-on sentence of utter amazement/chilling nothingness.

Congratulations! Now you know the entirety (or brevity) of your “character” for someone’s novel!

8. Now is the time to “become” that character you’ve always wanted to be or regretted that you are. It’s time to act! That’s right. Act like you.
9. Practice, practice, practice being yourself for seven days without ceasing. Remember, sleep is no excuse! Sleep like yourself.
10. Once you have accomplished this, record yourself acting like yourself, only more so, and send immeditately to the closest novelist. Be sure to include a loving or threatening or bland explanatory note. Alternately, write yourself as a (the only?) character in your own horrifying/thrilling/sleepifying novel or Frequently Asked Questions section of a hand-vac user’s manual.

Boom! That’s it! You are now on your way to becoming truly entrenched in the twists and turns of a splendiferous work of art (or 2000 page instructional manual on the correct method for parting your hair).